Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 Read Free Page B

problem, we'll just go back in time and change our meeting place last year, so she won't find us."
    "Good point."
    It was Jerboa who found the article in the Berkeley Daily Voice— a physics professor who lectured at Berkeley and also worked at Lawrence Livermore had gone missing in highly mysterious circumstances, six months earlier. And the photo of the vanished Professor Martindale—dark hair, laughing gray eyes, narrow mouth—looked rather a lot like Madame Alberta, except without any beauty mark or giant scarf.
    Jerboa emailed the link to the article to Lydia and Malik. "Do you think...?" the email read.
    The next meeting came around. Besides the three core members and Madame Alberta, there was Normando, who had finally tracked down that hippie chick in 1973 and was now going on the same first date with her over and over again, arriving five minutes earlier each time to pick her up. Lydia did not think that would actually work in real life.
    The others waited until Normando had run out of steam describing his latest interlude with Starshine Ladyswirl and wandered out to smoke a (vaguely postcoital) cigarette, before they started interrogating Madame Alberta. How did this alleged time machine work? Why was she building it in her laundry room instead of at a proper research institution? Had she absconded from Berkeley with some government-funded research, and if so were they all going to jail if they helped her?
    "Let us say, for the sake of the argument," Madame Alberta played up her weird accent even as her true identity as a college professor from Camden was brought to light, "that I had developed some of the theory of the time travel while on the payroll of the government. Yes? In that hypothetical situation, what would be the ethical thing to do? You are my steering committee, please to tell me."
    "Well," Malik said. "I don't know that you want the government to have a time machine."
    "Yeah, yeah," Jerboa said. "They already have warrantless wiretaps and indefinite detention. Imagine if they could go back in time and spy on you in the past. Or kill people as little children."
    "Well, but," Lydia said. "I mean, wouldn't it still be your responsibility to share your research?" But the others were already on Madame Alberta's side.
    "As to how it works," Madame Alberta reached into her big black trenchcoat and pulled out a big rolled-up set of plans covered in equations and drawings, which meant nothing to anybody. "Shall we say that it was the accidental discovery? One was actually working on a project for the Department of Energy aimed at finding a way to eliminate the atomic waste. And instead, one stumbled on a method of using spent uranium to create an opening two Planck lengths wide, lasting a few fractions of a microsecond, with the other end a few seconds in the future."
    "Uh huh," Lydia said. "So... you could create a wormhole too tiny to see, that only allowed you to travel a few seconds forward in time. That's, um... useful, I guess."
    "But then! One discovers that one might be able to generate a much larger temporal rift, opting out of the fundamental forces, and it would be stable enough to move a person or a moderate-sized object either forward or backward in time, anywhere from a few minutes to a few thousand years, in the exact same physical location," said Madame Alberta. "One begins to panic, imagining this power in the hands of the government. This is all the hypothetical situation, of course. In reality, one knows nothing of this Professor Martindale of whom you speaks."
    "But," said Lydia. "I mean, why us? I mean, assuming you really do have the makings of a time machine in your laundry room. Why not reach out to some actual scientists?" Then she answered her own question: "Because you would be worried they would tell the government. Okay, but the world is full of smart amateurs and clever geeks. And us? I mean, I work the day shift at a..." she tried to think of a way to say "pirate-themed sex